Electronics
Impact on the Environment

It takes about six hundred pounds of fossil fuels and
chemicals to create the chips for one personal computer.
Seventy pounds of water are used to rinse out impurities
in a single chip. The amount of waste generated to produce
one laptop is close to 4,000 times its weight. When you
throw away a 5 pound laptop you are throwing away roughly
20,000 pounds of waste.

Only 10 percent of the 140.3 million cell
phones retired in 2007 were recycled.35

Of the 2.25 million tons of electronics (TVs,
cell phones, computers, etc) retired in 2007,
82 percent were discarded, mostly to
landfills.36

About 304 million electronics were disposed of
from US households in 2005. Two-thirds of them
still worked.36

If we recycled all of the cell phones retired
each year, we would save enough energy to
power 18,500 homes for a year.36

In 2007, 82 percent of retired televisions and
computers were discarded, mostly to
landfills.37

In 2005, 61 percent of CRT monitors and
televisions collected for recycling were sent
abroad for remanufacture or refurbishment,
mostly to Asia or South America. Another 14
percent was sent abroad for glass-to-glass
processing.38

Recycling one million laptops saves enough
energy to power 3,657 American homes in a
year.38

Recycling one million cell phones allows
35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver,
75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium
to be recovered.38

Approximately 300 million ink cartridges are thrown away
each year! The production of a single ink jet cartridge
requires 2 and 1/2 ounces of oil. That's more than 6
million gallons of oil wasted each year.

Over 6 million DVDs go into landfills and incinerators
each year. DVDs have a shelf life of over 100 years.

Recycling
saves 95 percent of the energy required to make
aluminum from ore.

If
the recycling rate were to reach 80% at the
current level of beverage container sales, nearly
3 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions would
be avoided. This is equivalent to taking nearly
2.4 million cars off the road for a full year.

U.S. Beverage Container Recycling Scorecard and
Report

In
1972, 53 million pounds of aluminum were recycled.
Today, we exceed that amount weekly.